Whopper Of A Media Circus Kicks Off

January 20, 1998|By Tim Jones, Tribune Media Writer.

AMARILLO, Texas — Maybe all would be forgiven if Oprah would just saunter by any one of the Panhandle's 74 feedlots, chomping down on a big quarter-pounder and vowing before God and mini-cam: "Mercy! I'll never go back to bean curd!"

Then everybody--lawyers, security officers, reporters, photographers and Oprah Winfrey's fans--could go home, leaving Amarillo to get back to the business of raising beef, instead of arguing over it.

But apparently it is too late for America's premier daytime television celebrity and a bunch of mighty angry Texas cattlemen to call it off. The show, as they say, must go on.

Gagged by a federal judge but not bound, litigants in this unusual beef libel dispute go to court Tuesday for jury selection in an expected four-week trial that will test the elasticity of the 1st Amendment, the sanctity of common cattle and the patience of a community not accustomed to this kind of notoriety.

The trial supports communications theorist Marshall McLuhan's belief that the medium is the message.

People may swear off and swear at hamburgers every day, but when it's a nationally known figure with a loyal and adoring daily following that numbers 15 million to 20 million a day, words can carry a potentially terrific impact.

"It's a shame it couldn't have been one of those other ones," said one cattleman, referring to talk show hosts with far less credibility. "This made it that much more damaging."

Born of television, the cattlemen vs. Oprah Winfrey trial is a made-for-TV fight pitting the economic interests of the region against the enormous celebrity appeal of the Chicago-based talk show host.

Sensing a commercial motherlode, Winfrey has brought her TV crew to the High Plains and will tape shows. Amarilloans are tallying the economic benefits of all this attention. And a no-nonsense federal judge will try to maintain courtroom decorum amid a media circus atmosphere that surrounds the trial.

There are barricades around the federal building, to go along with the dinosaur-like TV satellite trucks that surround it. The telephone system jammed up late Friday afternoon from the deluge of callers dialing up a toll-free number to obtain tickets for the Winfrey shows. The gag order issued last month by U.S. District Judge Mary Lou Robinson may have silenced attorneys, but no one else.

"There may be nobody alive today who will see a bigger media circus than this," said John Kanelis, editorial page editor of the Amarillo Globe-News.

Local cattle farmers, led by Paul Engler, sued Winfrey and anti-meat activist Howard Lyman for remarks during a 1996 broadcast in which Lyman said that beef industry practices could promote so-called "mad cow" disease. Winfrey said in response that she was changing her eating habits.

"It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger!" she said, to the enthusiastic applause of her studio audience.

Meat prices, which had already been falling because of a severe drought, record-high feed prices and an oversupply of cattle, dropped further, although they returned to their pre-Oprah level about two weeks after the program.

Engler, who achieved notoriety when he waged a noisy and unsuccessful boycott of the Amarillo Globe-News in the 1980s, sued, claiming the remarks cost him $6.7 million. He used a 1995 Texas statute that made it an offense to say derogatory things about beef without scientific backing.

"I think something needed to be done to stop some of the irresponsible remarks against beef," said F.G. Collard, a cattleman in Amarillo for 40 years.

"When you get somebody on a television show representing himself as an expert," Collard said, referring to Lyman, "and he says things that are mostly unsubstantiated allegations, it creates a problem for our product. . . . There has to be some responsibility for things that are said in the media."

"You can't run up in a theater and say, `Fire!' or Bomb!' " Democratic state Rep. Bob Turner, a farmer who wrote the beef-slander bill, told The Associated Press. "Freedom of speech ends where other people's freedoms begin and where the truth is not known to be involved."

Turner's law is a tribute to the increasing power of the media, and a major reason why at least 12 other states have passed laws making it a crime to denigrate products, mostly fruits and vegetables.

The so-called "veggie libel" laws have their roots in a 1989 flap caused by a "60 Minutes" program challenging the safety of apples sprayed with a growth regulator, Alar. After the program aired, California and Washington apple growers lost millions, but a federal judge dismissed a 1993 damage suit against the network.

The trial will likely be the highest-profile test of these laws, whose constitutionality have been questioned by free-speech advocates and others. Dee Miller, a longtime Amarillo attorney, said the community is divided, but the most important issue is preserving 1st Amendment protections.